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As Epistemic Strategy in Hemans's Records Of R OMANTICT EXTUALITIES LITERATURE AND PRINT CULTURE, 1780–1840 • ISSN 1748-0116 ◆ ISSUE 23 ◆ SUMMER 2020 ◆ SPECIAL ISSUE : THE MINERVA PRESS AND THE LITERARY MARKETPLACE ◆ www.romtext.org.uk ◆ CARDIFF UNIVERSITY PRESS ◆ 2 romantic textualities 23 Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, 23 (Summer 2020) Available online at <www.romtext.org.uk/>; archive of record at <https://publications.cardiffuniversitypress.org/index.php/RomText>. Journal DOI: 10.18573/issn.1748-0116 ◆ Issue DOI: 10.18573/romtext.i23 Romantic Textualities is an open access journal, which means that all content is available without charge to the user or his/her institution. You are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from either the publisher or the author. Unless otherwise noted, the material contained in this journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (cc by-nc-nd) Interna- tional License. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ for more information. Origi- nal copyright remains with the contributing author and a citation should be made when the article is quoted, used or referred to in another work. C b n d Romantic Textualities is an imprint of Cardiff University Press, an innovative open-access publisher of academic research, where ‘open-access’ means free for both readers and writers. Find out more about the press at cardiffuniversitypress.org. Editors: Anthony Mandal, Cardiff University Maximiliaan van Woudenberg, Sheridan Institute of Technology Elizabeth Neiman (Guest Editor),University of Maine Christina Morin (Guest Editor),University of Limerick Reviews Editor: Barbara Hughes Moore, Cardiff University Editorial Assistant: Rebecca Newby, Cardiff University Platform Development: Andrew O’Sullivan, Cardiff University Cardiff University Press Administrator: Alice Percival, Cardiff University Advisory Board Peter Garside (Chair), University of Edinburgh Ian Haywood, University of Roehampton Jane Aaron, University of South Wales David Hewitt, University of Aberdeen Stephen Behrendt, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Gillian Hughes, Independent Scholar Emma Clery, Uppsala University Claire Lamont, University of Newcastle Benjamin Colbert, University of Wolverhampton Devoney Looser, Arizona State University Gillian Dow, University of Southampton Robert Miles, University of Victoria Edward Copeland, Pomona College Christopher Skelton-Foord,University of Durham Gavin Edwards, University of South Wales Kathryn Sutherland, University of Oxford Penny Fielding, University of Edinburgh Graham Tulloch, Flinders University Caroline Franklin, Swansea University Nicola Watson, Open University Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta Aims and Scope: Formerly Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text (1997–2005), Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 is an online journal that is committed to fore- grounding innovative Romantic-studies research into bibliography, book history, intertextuality and textual studies. To this end, we publish material in a number of formats: among them, peer-reviewed articles, reports on individual/group research projects, bibliographical checklists and biographical profiles of overlooked Romantic writers. Romantic Textualities also carries reviews of books that re- flect the growing academic interest in the fields of book history, print culture, intertextuality and cul- tural materialism, as they relate to Romantic studies. The ‘Dying-Tale’ as Epistemic Strategy in Hemans’s Records of Woman Angela• Aliff The popular participatory histories written by female Romantics resist New Historical contextualisation in organisation, content and intentionality. Elisa Beshero-Bondar observes the increasingly scholarly awareness of this resistance, pointing out that James Chandler and Jerome Christensen ‘have each proposed that Romanticism be dislodged from reductive chronological parameters as well as contextual approaches that limit engagement with the way literary texts formulate perspectives on history’.1 Felicia Hemans’s Records of Woman (1828) invites this shift with its achronological contents as well as her extensive personal involvement with her characters. Beshero-Bondar continues: ‘Such methods limit discussion of literature to matters narrowly relevant in theoretical paradigms of our time, and avoid engaging with how texts determine, assert, or examine epistemologies of history and culture on their own terms’.2 The standard practice of current scholarship in framing analysis with historical context sometimes overlooks the increasingly absent contextualisation in the anthologies of women’s writing published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These anthologies varied in their historical and contemporary selections, resulting in a sense that women’s writing was valued by situating it within the socio-political context of the female writers and their audiences. In Writing Women’s Literary History (1993), Margaret Ezell offers a broad view of the changes in approach to female anthologies, beginning with seventeenth- century collections of poetry with ‘a strong tradition of beginning with a section of commendatory verse by other writers, particularly in posthumous editions’, and resulting in an organisational structure that produces ‘a specific environment for reading the verse. After having read about the verse and its author, the reader then encounters it with certain expectations, predisposed to like, admire, and perhaps even emulate the contents’.3 Notably, these introductions are less concerned with clarifying historical detail than establishing a moral context for the reception of the contents. During the time of Hemans’s prolific literary career, the work of past female writers remained relatively accessible when compared to the aftermath of the Victorian solidification of the female canon. Yet, this accessibility was detached from chronological detail by the popular practice of excerpting. Ezell writes: In the latter part of the eighteenth century, the Ladies Magazine occasionally used Restoration and early eighteenth-century women’s writings as filler material. However, since the magazine did not 185 186 romantic textualities 23 date the poems, the reader would have already had to be familiar with Catherine Cockburn, Mary, Lady Chudleigh, Mrs. Lennox, and ‘Ardelia’ in order to appreciate such pieces as early specimens of women’s writing.4 As Ezell explains, selections in anthologies of women’s writing did not become truly canonised until the 1860s, a generation after Hemans’s death. As the edito- rial focus narrowed, so did access to the array of female writers that had existed before and during Hemans’s career. The canonical success of the elected female writers in late nineteenth-century anthologies existed alongside the increasingly popular framing of female writ- ing with expositions of the merits of their ‘feminine’ qualities.5 Hemans herself satisfied the complex expectations of an audience that described her poetry as ‘intensely feminine’ while maintaining her status as an immensely popular poet. Representing the opinion of her contemporaries, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine proclaimed that, ‘as a female writer, influencing the female mind, [Hemans] has undoubtedly stood, for some by-past years, the very first in rank’.6 Hemans’s poetry undoubtedly develops a female didacticism, but whether she intended to encour- age women to embrace domestic stereotypes or circumvented those stereotypes to educate women regarding their innate power is a complex interpretive problem, one that both an awareness and application of ‘affective historiography’ can answer. The emotional awareness of affective historiography, which acknowledges the complex and varied avenues for emotional transference, sometimes requires the suspension of temporality, or at least that temporality be temporarily deprioritised. To Greg Kucich, this approach is expansive and apparent in a central strategy in broader patterns of women’s historical revision- ism in the Romantic era of deepening the sympathetic registers developing in later eighteenth-century historiography. This more affective view of the past, emerging throughout a wide range of experimental histories by women writers, helped to shape a new historical consciousness more open to the social wrongs of the past and more committed to righting their persistence in the present.7 This emotional and moral consciousness appears throughout Hemans’s Records and reflects the kind of historical consciousness that Megan Matchinske advocates in her scholarship on Early Modern women. In finding commonalities between the affective historiography of the Romantics and Matchinske’s ethics of action, I will demonstrate how Early Modern women’s affective and constructive histories can illuminate the study of their female successors. As Matchinske writes, ‘margins/ limits are fleetingly discursive, both of the moment and for the moment, and that history—Herod’s, mine, yours—is local, immediate, particular and, always and necessarily, revisable’.8 This theoretical collapsing is surprisingly and productively reflective of Romantic women’s treatment of the past. Matchinske’s allusion to Herod follows her analysis of a small portion of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (1613). Act v begins with Nuntio’s brief soliloquy expressing his dread at having been chosen the ‘dying-tale’
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